Energy

‘Clear Conflict of Interest’: Biden-Harris Environmental Justice Advisors Raked In Nearly $500 Million From Taxpayers

President Joe Biden provides an update on Hurricane Helene, Sept. 30, 2024. (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

The Biden-Harris administration’s environmental justice advisors are slated to receive or influence the disbursal of nearly half a billion dollars in grant funding from agencies they advise.

These advisors sit on the 36-member White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC), an obscure but influential White House body created by executive fiat in January 2021 to provide policy recommendations to federal agency heads as part of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to environmental justice. The vast majority of the grant awards to environmental justice activist groups with representation on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) fall under the $41.5 billion awarded to the EPA under the Inflation Reduction Act, according to records examined by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Six environmental justice organizations represented on the WHEJAC have been awarded or are slated to receive more than $230 million in EPA grant funding, according to the DCNF review. The EPA has also selected four organizations represented on the WHEJAC to serve as award partners to $200 million in grant awards under the EPA’s $600 million Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking (EJTCG) program.

In December 2023, the EPA named Texas Southern University’s (TSU) Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, represented by Robert Bullard on the WHEJAC, as a recipient of a $50 million award under the agency’s EJTCG program. In April, the EPA doled out an additional $156 million to TSU’s Bullard Center to finance the development of community solar projects in “low-income and disadvantaged communities” as part of the IRA’s $7 billion Solar for All program.

“It is a very clear conflict of interest, and no one is going to be providing objective advice, or they’re going to be skewing that advice so it makes them more competitive to receive millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer benefits,” Gunasekara told the DCNF.

The EPA under Trump notably filed a directive to bar recipients of EPA grant awards from serving on the agency’s advisory boards in October 2017. The D.C. Circuit of Appeals unanimously struck down the directive after extensive litigation in April 2020.

In October 2023, the EPA announced smaller awards of half a million or less to several environmental justice organizations represented on the WHEJAC, including Ironbound Community Corporation, Appalachian Voices and the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance. The EPA confirmed these three awards have been obligated to the designated recipients in a statement to the DCNF.

Vice President Kamala Harris has courted the WHEJAC since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.

“We need your insight, your expertise, your lived experience. We need your ideas and your recommendations. Basically, we need you, period,” Vice President Kamala Harris told WHEJAC members during the advisory council’s first meeting in March 2021.

Several months later, the WHEJAC put out recommendations advocating against fossil fuel procurement, nuclear power, highway expansion, road improvements and research and development,” in addition to many other left-wing proposals in a May 2021 document.

Several influential WHEJAC members who lead organizations that have been awarded or are slated to receive major grant awards have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for President.

“The environmental justice community will be solidly behind Kamala,” Beverly Wright, WHEJAC member and founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), told Politico in an article published on Aug. 11.

Both Wright and Peggy Shepard, co-chair of the WHEJAC and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, respectively, spoke at Democratic National Committee (DNC) Environment and Climate Crisis Council meetings during the DNC convention in Chicago in August.

The WHEJAC has largely avoided congressional scrutiny by Republican lawmakers despite advancing an abundance of far-left environmental policies that conservative energy experts consider harmful to the pocketbooks of low-income and minority communities.

“It’s probably more accurate to call them the anti-economic growth, the anti-Black progress council,” Donna Jackson, director of membership development at the Project 21 Black Leadership Network, told the DCNF. “The problem is when they push for all of these radical regulations, when they fight against fossil fuels, who gets sacrificed? Which businesses close? The people that have the least amount of capital — minority communities. Every recommendation is a regressive tax on Black businesses and Black homeowners.”

“For the last three and a half years, they have been taking actions that have made it harder for communities to live, specifically lower-income minority communities, because of things like inflation and high cost energy, they’ve made life that much harder,” Mandy Gunasekara, former chief of staff to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler, told the DCNF.

Former President Donald Trump and his advisors have promised to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s environmental agenda, including the EPA’s stringent rules on new electric vehicle sales and the power sector, if he prevails in November.

Gunasekara confirmed to the DCNF that the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the EPA’s newly created Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will likely be on the chopping block as well.

“We would do away with these new offices that were created more as marketing gimmicks and as a process to waste taxpayer dollars by giving funding to nonprofits that have very little to do with improving environmental justice communities and more to do with ensuring Democrats stay in power,” Gunasekara told the DCNF.

“President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump Campaign National Press Secretary, wrote in a statement to the DCNF. “America’s energy agenda under President Trump produced affordable, reliable energy for consumers along with stable, high-paying jobs for small businesses — all while dropping U.S. carbon emissions to their lowest level in 25 years. Kamala Harris’ radical energy policies such as her EV mandate and the Green New Scam will hurt American workers, help China, and do virtually nothing to help the environment.”

The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, DSCEJ, TSU’s Bullard Center, Ironbound Community Corporation, Appalachian Voices and the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.